Monday, October 26, 2015

Iraq snapshot

Monday, October 26, 2015. Chaos and violence continue, Barack toys with more US troop involvement in Iraq, The Nation and The Progressive continue to ignore the Iraq War and last week's US combat fatality, protests continue, and much more.

Starting with news of even more war, Missy Ryan and Greg Jaffe (Washington Post) report,The president’s most senior national security advisers have recommended
measures that would move U.S. troops closer to the front lines in Iraq
and Syria, officials said, a sign of mounting White House
dissatisfaction with progress against the Islamic State and a renewed
Pentagon push to expand military involvement in long-running conflicts
overseas.

U.S. military commanders have forwarded several options to
the Defense Department in the last few weeks, the officials told The
Hill, as part of a mounting push within the administration to more
aggressively target the terrorist group.

One
of the options presented was embedding U.S. troops with Iraqi security
forces; they would have the ability to call in airstrikes, a step that
would bring American forces to the front line.

RT: Can the Pentagon still realistically
maintain its 'no boots on the ground' stance given that an American
soldier has been killed apparently in action?Phyllis Bennis:
I think the question of US boots on the ground has been true for over a
year now. We’ve had at least 35,000 troops in Iraq that went back last
year and I don’t think most people in this [US] country recognize the
difference any more than they would in Russia if and when Russian troops
or volunteers are sent to Syria; if somebody tries to claim they are
not combat troops, nobody would believe that either. These are troops
engaged in combat. They are advising, they are supporting, they are
arming, they are training and they are fighting with forces on the
ground. So, the notion that there are ‘no boots’ is simply not
the case. We also know that besides 35,000 US troops on the ground in
Iraq there are an unknown number of other Special Forces and CIA forces
on the ground. Maybe they wear sneakers rather than boots. But there is
no question that US forces have been fighting directly in Iraq for more
than a year now.

Prominent American author and linguist Noam Chomsky has
blasted the US foreign policy, calling Washington's 2003 invasion of
Iraq “the worst crime of this century.”“What right do we have to kill somebody in some other country who we don't like,” Chomsky told teleSUR on Monday.Calling the US-led invasion of Iraq “the worst crime of this
century,” the renowned scholar and intellectual said, “Suppose it had
worked... it's still a major crime, why do we have the right to invade
another country?”

But sadly not everyone can follow Noam's example.

Take two of our 'great' rags on the left: The Progressive and The Nation.

The Progressive ignored the death and its implication.

Remember, editor Ruth Conniff bragged on KPFA that she didn't know anyone who'd been touched by the war.

How very nice for her and the other racists in the gated community she lives in.

Airstrikes in IraqAttack, bomber, fighter, ground attack and remotely piloted
aircraft conducted 15 airstrikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in
support of the government of Iraq:-- Near Beiji, one strike struck a large ISIL tactical unit and
destroyed four ISIL fighting positions, three ISIL mortar positions, an
ISIL heavy machine gun, and an ISIL cave entrance.-- Near Habbaniyah, two strikes suppressed two ISIL mortar positions.-- Near Kisik, one strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.-- Near Mosul, one strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.-- Near Ramadi, five strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and
destroyed two ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL weapon caches, an ISIL
command and control node, an ISIL building, and denied ISIL access to
terrain.-- Near Sinjar, three strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed 18 ISIL fighting positions and two ISIL vehicles.-- Near Sultan Abdallah, one strike suppressed an ISIL sniper position.

-- Near Tal Afar, one strike destroyed an ISIL fighting position.

In addition, Alsumaria notes 2 corpses discovered in Baghdad (a mother and her son). Xinhua adds a Baghdad suicide bomber took their own life and the lives of 2 other people (twelve more left injured), 1 woman and her husband were shot dead in Husseiniyah, and a Latifiyah roadside bombing claimed the life of 1 Iraqi soldier with two more left injured.

War Criminal Tony Blair is familiar with protests and objections and, today, he is back in the news.

Why?

Tina Nguyen (Vanity Fair) explains, "Ever since former British prime minister Tony Blair
stepped down from office in 2007, he hasn’t received the love he may
have hoped for, primarily due to that teensy matter of dragging Great
Britain into the Iraq war and getting the nation stuck in that deadly
quagmire along with the United States. In an attempt to make everything
right, he apologized for his actions on Sunday during an interview with
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. Long story short, it didn’t work."

War Criminal Tony Blair plotted and planned the crime with others.

He still can't accept the fact that there is no comeback for him. Justin Wm. Moyer (Washington Post) notes that Blair's issuing a limited apology:Former British prime minister Tony Blair made the comment in a interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.“When people look at the rise of ISIS, many people point to the
invasion of Iraq as the principal cause,” Zakaria said. “What do you say
to that?”

“I think there are elements of truth in that,” Blair said, “but I
think we’ve got to be extremely careful. Otherwise, we’ll misunderstand
what’s going on in Iraq and Syria today.”

Again, it's a limited apology.

He insists "mistakes" were made.

Not in lying, he won't admit to that.

"I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong," he declared.

But he knew it was wrong and he manipulated the intel.

His 'apology' only continues his long string of lies.

He doesn't apologize for starting the illegal war.

But, after it started, "mistakes" were made.

He really seems to be testing the waters for whether or not he can break with Bully Boy Bush.

Breaking with Bush would allow him to, as the Iraq Inquiry did in public
testimony, pin the blame on the US government for de-Ba'athification.

Blair's limited apology is an attempt to water down the outrage that still greets him.

What he's still refusing to grasp is that the illegal war will haunt him until his dying day.

Families of soldiers killed in Iraq have told of their “revulsion” at Tony Blair’s failure to give a full apology for the war and warned that the Chilcot report will be “a cover-up”. [. . .] Reg Keys, whose son Lance Corporal Tom Keys was killed in Iraq in
2003, said that he felt “revulsion” when he heard Mr Blair’s comments.“I feel revulsion,” Mr Keys said. “This man certainly got it wrong.
179 British service personnel dead, 3,500 wounded. Not to mention the
hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children that
lost their lives. The guy has got to hold his hands up [and say] I got
it wrong and I apologise.”Mr Keys added: ““I feel that he’s obviously pre-empting the Iraq
inquiry’s findings. It’s finger-pointing. He’s blaming intelligence
chiefs for giving him the wrong intelligence. He’s not apologising for
toppling Saddam.“What about apologising for the unnecessary loss of life? The reason
we went to war was weapons of mass destruction, not to topple Saddam.”

In human terms, the accounting is stark. Hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis are estimated to have been killed in the violence unleashed
in 2003, though the true number of deaths remains unknown. The
continuing bloodshed in Iraq has contributed to the biggest refugee crisis since World War II,
and the ascent of ISIS has exacerbated the outflow of refugees from
Syria as well. “They are the forgotten casualties of the Iraq war. Fully
one in six Iraqis (4.7 million people) fled or were forced from their
homes following the U.S. led invasion in 2003, and most have not
returned,” the International Rescue Committee writes.
“Close to half are living in neighboring countries such as Jordan and
Syria, while the remainder are uprooted within Iraq’s borders.” How
would they answer the question of whether things are better now that
Saddam’s gone?

About Me

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